Short Fiction Ripped From the Headlines

I wasn’t a big fan of Joyce Carol Oates’ story “Landfill” in last week’s New Yorker. It felt to me a little too obvious, this story about an insecure college student’s drunken and accidental death thanks to the carelessness of the brothers at the fraternity where he was a pledge. It seemed too “ripped from the headlines,” too after school special, and on top of all that it was emotionally cheap – designed to provoke outrage with little complexity. So, it was interesting to discover that Oates’ story was indeed ripped from the headlines. The death of Hector Jr. very closely resembles that of a young man who had attended The College of New Jersey, so much so that Oates was compelled to apologize “for any offense she caused.”

Obviously, quite a lot of fiction is drawn from real life events, but I think in this case, because Oates’ story was so one-note and so geared toward generating disgust, the connection was simply to stark to ignore. (via Jeff)

August 6th marked the 64th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima and today marks the anniversary of the bombing of Nagasaki. As part of its op-ed page this weekend, the Los Angeles Timesoffered several firsthand accounts of the bombings by survivors, taken from a documentary made by the Hiroshima Peace Cultural Center. You can find the complete, translated transcripts of these testimonies at this link.Here is an excerpt from the testimony of Akihiro Takahashi who was 14 at the time of the Hiroshima bombing:That was the moment when the blast came. And then the tremendous noise came and we were left in the dark. I couldn’t see anything at the moment of explosion just like in this picture. We had been blown by the blast. Of course, I couldn’t realize this until the darkness disappeared. I was actually blown about 10 m. My friends were all marked down on the ground by the blast just like this. Everything collapsed for as far as I could see. I felt the city of Hiroshima had disappeared all of a sudden. Then I looked at myself and found my clothes had turned into rags due to the heat. I was probably burned at the back of the head, on my back, on both arms and both legs. My skin was peeling and hanging like this. Automatically I began to walk heading west because that was the direction of my home. After a while, I noticed somebody calling my name. I looked around and found a friend of mine who lived in my town and was studying at the same school. His name was Yamamoto. He was badly burnt just like myself. We walked toward the river. And on the way we saw many victims. I saw a man whose skin was completely peeled off the upper half of his body and a woman whose eye balls were sticking out. Her whole baby was bleeding. A mother and her baby were lying with a skin completely peeled off. We desperately made a way crawling. And finally we reached the river bank. At the same moment, a fire broke out. We made a narrow escape from the fire. If we had been slower by even one second, we would have been killed by the fire.

Apropos of a post earlier this month on limiting and culling overflowing book collections, Scott McLemee takes on the topic (via) in Inside Higher Ed. Leaving aside whether we are somehow seeing (in a trend that would fly in the face of publishing industry gloom-and-doomers) an explosion of ill advised impulse book buying around the world, lets have a look at the solutions recently proposed. Recall that the article mentioned in the above linked post suggested conducting “regular inspections of your library;” following “the ‘one in, one out’ rule;” spending “more to buy less by sticking with hardbacks;” using the library more, and “beginning to follow the ‘Google Books’ rule.McLemee looks at a professor, overrun by books, who has reached a breaking point. A case study of sorts:At the start, my correspondent estimated that he had 130 feet of books occupying his office. That works out to the equivalent, with ordinary bookshelves, of about 40 to 50 shelves’ worth. He said the moment of decision came when he realized that reducing the collection to “the hard core of actually useful information [without] a lot of filler” would have a fringe benefit: “I could fit a comfortable reading chair in my office.”It sounded like the first thing to go was the dream of reducing his holdings to just two or three dozen titles necessary for preparing lectures. This extreme ambition was revised to trimming down to roughly 60 feet of books. The effort would take a few days, he thought; and he hoped to finish before leaving on a trip that would take him away from the office for a week or so.Along the way the gamut of emotions are felt:There is a kind of exhilaration to it. But it requires full acceptance of the reality that there will be pain later: the remorse over titles you never retrieved from the discard pile.Not sure why I’m dwelling on this topic of late, but I suspect has to do with the fact that we’re moving again soon, and with that comes inevitable book culling, though this time the damage should be limited. Best of all, we’re finally (finally!) going to be moving somewhere where we’ll be living for more than a year, so I can unbox all the books and put them on some sort Mrs. Millions-created shelving masterpiece. Brilliant.

8 comments:

This is an interesting new slant on the classic literary dichotomy, is it not? How acceptable is it to work with real life?

As upsetting as it is for people close to the student who died to read 'Landfill', shouldn't we welcome this article as a response and critique of the growing frat culture? It could be seen as Oates flagging up the dangers of frat houses and serve as a warning to parents and prospective pledges alike.

That's the problem, though. I find it awfully tiresome that Oates would devote herself to warning people of the dangers of frat houses. What's next? A book about not taking candy from strangers? This story told as a cautionary tale brings nothing new to the table. The world is full of cautionary tales on this subject. That the story is exploitative only makes matters worse.

Agreed the story may not necessarily bring new things to the table as such, but they way it is written is a new dimension in 'frat lit', as it were.

Tom Woolfe's 'I Am Charlotte Simmons'; it attempted a portrait of frat culture and twenty first century campus life but it utterly spun it out to an overtold tale. Oates' style actually captures the breezy, come-and-go ethic of a frat house. Those 'snatches' of dialogue and testimony are excellent literary methods of showing the dangers of frat houses, whilst also bringing the entire habitat mentality, to the reader.

To me, that ability and talent legitimise and distinguish her yes, cliche, source of inspiration.

I see your point. Oates certainly has her detractors, but it's hard to ignore her impressive and wide-ranging storytelling ability.

I suppose my argument is that if 'frat lit' is narrowly focused on the shocking tales of excess and depravity of priviledged young men, then I'm not that interested in reading about it unless somebody can move beyond the agressor vs. victim dynamic to something a little more complex.

Oates rips her story from the headlines, but – without having read much about the actual events it is based on – I'd argue that she has simplified matters by making Hector Jr. be hellbent on being a victim and by making the aggressors faceless and one note. This oversimplification is likely part of what got her into trouble in the first place.

Sure frat lit and campus novels could serve as metaphor for modern life, but I can't recall having seen it done convincingly. Which isn't to say that I don't enjoy these books. They're often quite entertaining. Lucky Jim anyone?

But in a world where the medium is the message, Landfill works in part because its prose is so good. You care for the Hector Jr. character and even more for his parents. I also admire Joyce Carol Oates ability to shift points of view — generally a no-no with short stories. Ripped from the headlines or not, Landfill is a worthy read.

Ed Champion has a nemesis, Time magazine book reviewer Lev Grossman, as we discover in Grossman’s latest column. Though somewhat tongue in cheek, Grossman is basically asking bloggers to use their power for good. All in all, it’s far more civilized than Steve Almond’s pathetic attempted takedown of Mark Sarvas in Salon from a year ago, which read like a laundry list of Almond’s insecurities. Grossman’s essay and Ed’s response make it clear that Grossman is an altogether more pleasant person than Almond and that the relationship between book bloggers and the literati has matured. As Ed notes in his brief response to Grossman, he (and other book bloggers) are regularly paid to pen book reviews in major newspapers. The lines are blurring. Oh, and I’ve met Ed. He’s not that scary.

One of the familiar knocks on the short story master Donald Barthelme is that his fiction is all artifice – that, to quote Saul Bellow, it “lack[s] an inner life.” Well, Lorrie Moore, having digested the new Barthelme biography, Hiding Man, is having none of it. “In a way,” she explains in the current New York Review of Books,Barthelme’s work was all inner life, partially concealed, partially displayed. His stories are a registration of a certain kind of churning mind, cerebral fragments stitched together in the bricolage fashion of beatnik poetry. The muzzled cool, the giddy play, the tossed salad of high and low…Here, ladies and gentlemen, is contrarian criticism at its very best: illuminating rather than annihilating. Similarly surprising, and revealing, is Moore’s decision to consider the Barthelme oeuvre alongside that of Raymond Carver, in many ways his stylistic opposite. Moore is no short-story slouch herself, and one suspects she’s learned a trick or two from the School of Don B. This might help account for her sure-handed handling of Barthelme’s life and work. At any rate, like Deborah Eisenberg and Zadie Smith, whose essays have also enlivened recent issues of the NYRB, she has the virtue not only of writing like a reader, but of reading like a writer. Check out her Barthelme essay, “How He Wrote His Songs.”

Last week, The New Yorker ran a profile (subscription required) of Ian McEwan that was scarcely shorter than McEwan’s most recent novel, On Chesil Beach. For all its expansiveness, however, the article failed to offer readers the supreme pleasure of McEwan’s best fiction: a kind of psychological X-ray. And where writer Daniel Zalewski did manage to see inside McEwan the man, he seemed to discover there – perhaps unwittingly – a certain metaphysico-aesthetic complacency. For example, of John Banville’s quite valid complaint about Saturday’s “rosy” view of marriage (the wealthy and brilliant protagonist starts his day with wake-up sex), McEwan remarked, “The critic was revealing far more about himself and his wife’s teeth-flossing habits than anything about the book.”A measure of pride may be in order – Atonement sold 2 million copies! Still, self-satisfaction represents one of writing’s occupational hazards, in both senses of the phrase. Doubt is for the novelist what faith is for the priest.Anyway, I’m pleased to report that my worries about McEwan were short-lived. His meditation on John Updike in the New York Review of Books shows us an empiricist still capable of wonderment. Better yet, unlike the New Yorker piece, the NYRB essay is free to all online. If time constraints force you to choose between reading Ian McEwan and reading about Ian McEwan… well, you know what to do.